Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions the effect recent developments in the MySQL community will have on MySQL's future in the wake of Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Even before Oracle announced its buyout, there were signs of strain within the MySQL community, with key MySQL employees exiting and forks of the MySQL codebase arising, including Widenius' MariaDB.

I think the popularity of MySQL is just momentum. Early on was simple to install and use. It was reliable, well tested, and fast.

My first experienced in the late 90s were in comparison to Postgres, which was terrible to use at the time. Slow complicated, buggy, and arcanely complicated. Version 7 was the turnaround. Since then it's been very good.

And Oracle, which was way too complicated, way to expensive, and massive overkill for an OLTP website.

Other databases suffered from one or other problems that made MySQL just seem like a better, simpler choice.

Add in the LAMP environment which universally leveraged MySQL and you get to where we are now.

I've used Postgres, Oracle, MS SQL Server often enough in the last few years, and had few complaints. I can't explain a preference for MySQL beyond relatively good experiences, and long term reliability. A decade is a long time in computing.